Still their office. I want the bastard who put me on a robocall list that calls my house phone as early as 6 AM or as late as 10 PM (yes, it does, and no, the secretary of state's office says it's not actually illegal and they can't do anything about it) strung up by the balls.

In my opinion, the appropriate response to such nuisance calls is the phrase "Impersonal robo-calling at 6am is losing you votes." followed by a loud air horn. Repeat at least six times, to be sure you get your money's worth.

simple solution for that, just set your phone to call forward to the politicians call centre! Done right, and with a bit of luck, you could take out multiple call agents (and trunk bandwidth with every call they make!

csb time: I had just added fancy dialing packages for call-forwarding, call-waiting, caller-id and some others (this was 10 or 15 yrs ago when that was still somewhat new). I wasn't used to all the star- number- number codes yet.

I was planning on having a phone interview and didn't want to be disturbed, so I disabled call-waiting for the duration of the call. I dialed the prefix, waited for beeps, then dialed the number for the company I was supposed to interview with. we had our little interview chat and we ended the call. that was that.

or so I thought.

a day or two goes by and my girlfriend (who gets all the calls; I never get phone calls) tells me that people have not been calling her lately. is something wrong with the phone? I go to check things out.

yes, it turns out, I had enabled call-forwarding for the duration of that call. and all calls! until explicitly disabled!

even worse, the poor guy at the company that I called: he was getting OUR phone calls! "who the hell is alison? why do people keep calling asking for alison?? I just don't understand it!". I can imagine that is what was going thru the poor guy's head.

I never did hear back from that company. not sure if they knew what was going on or not; but it was only enabled for a few days...

learned my lesson. make sure you press the right sequence and don't just assume you got *-something-something right.

They wrote the laws, gave themselves an exemption, and have better access to law enforcement and legal advice than you or I.

While I agree that they have better access to legal advice, if you really did want to stick it to the man, your country still has courts that may stick to the letter of the law, but juries generally vote with common sense and a sense of justice. I would be very very surprised if the found someone guilty of robocalling the same candidate that robocalled them. If you filed for costs right at the start, you would likely get off free minus your time in court. The deck might be stacked in their favour, but a jur

Except that judges usually don't tell the ignorant masses which compose a jury about jury nullification, and if they do, they instruct the jury to follow the law and not allow sympathy towards a party to sway their decision. Further, one attorney or the other, or the court itself, depending on jurisdiction will weed out jury members who might be emotionally swayed, or have the intelligence to understand the concept behind jury nullification.

The most common expression of jury nullification in years past was for all-white juries to refuse to convict whites for murdering blacks. Juries are expressly for the purpose of deciding the facts, not the law, for precisely this reason.

This might be true, except that it's not. There are states which explicitly give juries the power to decide both law and fact in their Constitutions. Oregon is one such state, though the jury instructions they give directly contradict the state's Constitution.

Exactly. The last time I was summoned for Jury Duty, the judge told us "raise your hand if you will consider anything beyond the evidence and your instructions during deliberations." Out of a pool of about 100, mine was the only hand to go up. I was under oath, and had to answer honestly. When questioned personally about my action, I informed the Judge, "It is my belief that our Constitution does not forbid jury nullification. As a juror, who has the potential to legally strip a defendant of liberty and property, I am the final arbiter of 'justice' in the application of the law, and the only thing standing between a defendant, and punishment for a law which may be unfair. In an extreme case, I cannot guarantee I would not use this power to nullify." The judge nodded and subtly smiled, apparently somewhat amused. The defense attorney's smile was more pronounced. And I could easily hear the Prosecuting attorney's pen as it scratched my name off his list.

good point, but in the citizens favour is the fact that he is one person, making repeated but solitary calls to a single number, and one that is one of the official lines of communication with his representative. (with recent events, it's hard to write that without laughing, as if the politician actually represented any of his electors!)

The politician, on the other hand, is making thousands of calls, to thousands of numbers. In many cases, they are calling a given individual more than once as they cycle t

State laws vary. I've had trouble with a local politician whose district has never included me (but whose district did cover another part of the ZIP code my phone number was issued in) whose robocalls come in as early as 6 AM and as late as 10 PM. The Secretary of State's office for my state (since US states don't have foreign relations, the SOS office deals primarily with incorporating companies and conducting elections) said that it would not be illegal for them to robocall me at any hour of day or night.

Any reasonably competent lawyer could argue you out of any charges on this on first amendment grounds. Not primarily the freedom of speech part, although that enters in, but the "right of the people to...petition the government for redress of grievances" part.

Any reasonably competent lawyer could argue you out of any charges on this on first amendment grounds. Not primarily the freedom of speech part, although that enters in, but the "right of the people to...petition the government for redress of grievances" part.

Any mentally competent American can see there is no Constitution, Bill of Rights, or Amendments being afforded any level of respect anywhere, in this post 9/11, PATRIOTic era we live in.

Spare me the history lesson until you can prove we actually still have a justice system, and not a legal system that does nothing but cater to the 1% who in this case, also happen to be the same 1% charging you with a crime. Good luck.

Yep. Communist Russia had a wonderful constitution, outlining all sorts of individual rights, and it was regularly ignored by the state apparatus. With a majority of the USA Supreme Court now biased in favour of corporate rights over individual rights, non court-supervised secret intelligence/military operations against citizens, and more - the USA is well travelled down that same path.

The politicians who wrote the laws about such things game themselves an exemption to call you. It is entirely possible that if you turn around it do it to them, you could be doing something illegal.

They didn't just exempt themselves, they exempted political organisations [ftc.gov] - an organisation dedicated to delivering the grievances of the citizenry to politicians sounds like the very definition of a political organisation. But then again, I am not a lawyer or a politician.

The politicians who wrote the laws about such things game themselves an exemption to call you. It is entirely possible that if you turn around it do it to them, you could be doing something illegal.

Remember, the deck is stacked, and not in your favor.

Exactly.

I've had to run a few of the robocall systems, and I frequently asked questions about it all.

Me: Can we give them a 'press 1 to unsubscribe' option?
Them: No, otherwise everyone would unsubscribe.

Me: What should I do with incoming calls (when people hit *69)?
Them: Just drop the call.

Me: I thought robocalling was illegal?
Them: It is. We're exempt because there are special provisions in $STATE-TELEMARKETER-BILL that allow for political calls.

Me: Hmm. The bill says we must stop calling at 6 PM, otherwise it says were 'harassing' people and could be liable...
Them: Look further down--it says political calls are exempt and can be run until 9 PM. And also on Saturday as early as 9 AM.

I remember waaay back in 7th grade, a kid was trying to impress everyone on the playground by saying he could build a 'screamer' bomb. It was a special 'pulse' you could send down the phone line that would blow up computers at the other end. Untraceable too.

I remember waaay back in 7th grade, a kid was trying to impress everyone on the playground by saying he could build a 'screamer' bomb. It was a special 'pulse' you could send down the phone line that would blow up computers at the other end. Untraceable too.

*sigh* Every 4 years I start wishing that kid was right...;)

Back in college, I had a computer which experienced a motherboard frying. This was determined to have been due to a lightning strike, which went through the phone line, hitting the modem which did not have protection circuitry, thus making its way to the juicy components. I'm not saying throw lightning bolts at Congress, or am I?

Been there, done that. I had an old system hooked up to the phone line with an FXO card and running asterisk. It had a default-deny policy -- meaning that if there wasn't an explicitly defined route that matched the incoming caller ID info the caller would get a short, snarky recording telling them to get lost and then get disconnected. If you got past that hump, the next step was "to continue in english, press 1". The next hump is a call queue where you'd hear hold music. At that point the phones inside the house would actually start to ring.

It was fun to look through the CDR list at the end of the month and look at all the calls that got dropped due to no Caller ID info. Since then the hard drive died and I've been too lazy to hash out the replacement system.

It doesn't matter how it's played, if you hold 13 clubs, unless your partner has all the aces, kings, and queens, you will lose the hand. The only way you make 7NT is if the person on your right bids it (and they can only get there if incompetent, as any number of bidding systems ask for and answer stoppers, such that a hand with 13 of one suit being in one hand must* (under any reasonable bidding) be in a suit. 7C is the bid. That's not a problem with the deck stacked against you, but with your bidding.

No... you'd turn the cards in and ask for a re-deal. Or if you were unscrupulous, you'd bid 1 club, and increase as necessary until you win the bidding. Your score in Bridge isn't for winning all 13 tricks, it's for winning more tricks than you bid. You bid 7, you are saying that you'll win all 13 tricks. But if you bid 1, you're saying you'll win 7 tricks, and then the extra 6 are just going to increase your score that much more. You'd bid "no trump" if you're holding all the face cards.:)

If the service gets shut down, there could be an alternative. There are smartphones in every other pocket, or so. An app that dials a number and plays a sound file, networked with other such phones in a botnet-style way (opt-in, and users able to decide what calls they approve of), without any central authority, fits into this scheme. The politicos in question then can not even block the calls based on incoming number, as each number will belong to a real person, and no number will be calling more than once per a fairly long period, which is not sufficient for harassment charges.

Using this on politicos' personal phone numbers at 6 AM would be the real fair game. If only one of ten people woken up by a robocall participate in this, it has a chance of quite decent success.

If they annoy us, let's annoy them! We can do it, we have the technology.

Whoever modded the above Flamebait is sadly, no, make that tragically out of touch with what is going on in the US today. The OP's statement is feasible based on just 2 items that came out of the government this week. Worst part? It would be legal!

The Obama government (whom I supported in 2008) is turning out to be one scary piece of work.

LOL. Instead of just being very vague to try and sound insightful, please specifically lay out for me which policies or actions by the "Obama government" makes you believe it is feasible that someone would be killed by the government for reverse robocalling politicians.

Let me get this straight. You don't think a "politician" would feel "threatened" by a Robodialer enough to put the person on a "Terrorist Watch List" or something?

No, not really. In fact, if YOU believe they'd kill someone over a phone call, then they'd probably feel more threatened by you. If you are unstable enough to believe in such craziness, there no predicting what sort of action you might take to protect yourself from those delusions.

"They" have killed quite a few people for being a "dangerous terrorist". The only difference is this guy also had American citizenship. If you were going to be worried about this you should have started worrying when they started killing people. It shouldn't suddenly change everything because this time, the bad guy who was assassinated was an American.

I'm simultaneously amused and disgusted by your delusional belief that the nationality of the victim is more important than the murder. You've reminded me of the reason you're on my list of idiots and fools.

They* killed a killed a guy for being... "dangerous terrorist". No trial, no judge, no lawyer, no oversight.

Care to share the name? News reports? Evidence? If you have evidence, go to the press, or Cryptome or...

...

So, back to the point, citations please.

Well, assuming GP was referring to US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki [wikipedia.org], there is no shortage of press commentary. Apparently US citizen Salmir Khan [wikipedia.org] was killed in the same attack, but was not deliberately targeted, being just another collateral casualty. The press reports include statements of concern regarding this extra-judicial execution of al-Awlaki being ordered by the sitting US president. It was not a "heat of the moment" death in a shootout or in an attempt to escape from being arrested. Moreover, was not convicted of any offence, not even in absentia. Although many accusations were made (presumably with justification), no charges were ever laid against him. From what is in the press reports, he was by no means a Mahatma Gandhi, but the ordering of an execution without even going through the motions of a trial (not even a mock trial) should be disturbing to any US citizen. It's easier to slide down the slippery slope than to climb back up.

Oh, here's a few press references, in the Wahington Post [washingtonpost.com], the Huffington Post [huffingtonpost.com], and CBS News [cbsnews.com]. Use your Google-fu to find many many more. There is also an interesting comment in the New York Times [nytimes.com], which suggests that legal advice given to the president before the execution was that it would be illegal.

They have made themselves one of the explicit exceptions to the automated dialing laws they passed. "Here's a law that stops our voters from being harassed over the phone by everyone, except us of course."

There are a few additional exceptions, but not many. There ought to be a law that bans electoral bodies from passing laws with provisions to make the voting body an exception to the law being passed. Just one of those "I can't believe they had the balls to do that" stunts by our country's legislature. Really, if they can get away with that, they can get away with about anything.

There ought to be a law that bans electoral bodies from passing laws with provisions to make the voting body an exception to the law being passed.

Except that these are exceptionally cheap to operate. If you ban them altogether, then you make running for office that much more expensive. Political 'speech' is not something to be restricted lightly.

There is a law against it. It's the elections law. You voted them into power, then voted to keep them there after they did it. You have the power and refuse to use it. Where the campaign money goes doesn't matter if the voters would vote intelligently.

Interesting idea, since businesses aren't covered by the do not call registry you'd be clear there, but you still might fall afoul of harassment laws if you repeatedly call the same party. Perhaps a better implementation might be to get a large list of inbound campaign (telemarketing not political) numbers and allow you to sign up to call those which you select from a list, if enough people do this it might drive down the profitability of such call centers. Personally since I almost never give out my home n

Political speech is speech done by a politician. Not speech too a politician. Politicians themselves have the largest degree of protection, and if the message is just a complaint then they will call it harassment, and if the message against them has anything resembling a threat, it won't just be the police, it will be homeland security.

Do you wish to look as happy as me? Well, you've got the power inside you right now.So, use it! And send one dollar to Happy Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield.Don't delay, eternal happiness is just a dollar away.

...you're just making the staffers' lives miserable. The ones that sometimes struggle to survive in the DC area due to the cost of living if they're new. The ones with 4 roommates and 2 other jobs. You won't affect your representative, but you will be a jerk. Congratulations.

you might as well say the protesters in a dictactorship shouldn't protest because they will not affect the dictator, they will just make the life of police and militarymiserable because they are the ones that have to shoot them

I haven't gotten one of these lately, but I did a while back get a political call that was very annoying. I hung up and the phone rang again continuing with the message. I hung up again, and it called me back.
This was like 6-10 years ago I think. That can't be kosher..

A while back I donated money to the ACLU. I thought it would go towards defending civil liberties, but it turned out my donation was used to pay a company to repeatedly call me and ask for more money.

THIS.

That's exactly why I am loathe to donate to any charity. I just don't know what else they will do with the transactional information and its bullshit that I should even have to worry about it. I only give cash to places I can walk in to. The EFF is happy to take walk in cash donations, BTW.

Why are you hoarding his card? Information wants to be free - you should give it away. And if you give it to someone who says "Thank You", punch them in the mouth, because getting compensated for work like that is a sign that you've fallen victim to moral decay!

Starting in about the 2004 election, the tactics of the local election robocalls changed quite a bit. The call would start out with a line like: "Hi! I'd like to talk to you about candidate Mark Smith..."

At that point, you'd hang up thinking "Damn Mark Smith!" BUT: what you didn't know was that a few more minutes into the call, you'd discover that the call was sponsored by Mark's opponent, and if you had stayed on long enough, you would have heard about Mark's failings and how good his opponent was.

If you were on the fence before the call, you SURE weren't going to vote for Mark after a dozen of THOSE calls.

The "R"s used this a LOT in 2004, and it has picked up every year since then.

Just this past summer the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals found that a union could be held liable under computer hacking laws (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) for doing exactly this -- using a combination of auto-dialing and member phone calls to protest an action, and thus filling up the business' voicemail and making the lines unavailable for a period of time:

While I am ALL for bombarding our sometimes misguided, uninformed or overzealous congressmen with public opinion...I have a fear that giving people the ability to set up automated calling in this fashion would just overwhelm their call centers to the point where they just stop picking up the phone and listening to the public at all.

So now how can we expand this marvelous service to include pollsters, banks, realtors, obnoxious sales people, wall street brokers, anybody with a "good deal", scammers and my cousin Freddie who just can't figure out that some people actually *sleep* at night?

I can't speak for the US, but in Canada Robo-calls are already illegal... unless you're a politician... must be nice to be able to write yourself an exemption in to any law you pass.

I generally make it a policy never to vote for anyone who uses such scummy practices. Problem is, I believe that I should vote, and last election there weren't any candidates on the ballot who hadn't robo-called my cell phone at least once, one of them almost 10 times!

I can't speak for the US, but in Canada Robo-calls are already illegal

Yeah, like that's working.

I've gotten to the point where if I don't immediately know the number (or if you can't show me in the first 15 seconds that you are someone I do business with) then I just have to assume the caller is fraudulent and tell them to fsck themselves.

I get so many &^%#^%*( robo-calls in a week the fact that it's ostensibly illegal is almost laughable. There's no teeth to the enforcement, and the people calling fro

Actually, the last robocall that called me WAS calling from Texas. I got through to a real person, and my opening gambit was "what part of the US is your call centre located in?" He must have been new, because he answered, and was then very confused. I then explained to him that the people who hired the people who hired his call centre were engaged in illegal activity, in contravention of numerous laws, and asked to speak to his manager. HE didn't know what to do, but eventually I heard the click of som

Tell that to the Conservatives. They're using robodiallers on their political campaigns, even though the rules say quite clearly that the rules for robodiallers apply regardless of whether the person on whose behalf the calls are being made is exempt from DNC rules, and that robodiallers may not be used without express consent, which is defined as an explicit oral or written contract permitting this kind of communication.

I am going to bookmark that one for the next political campaign in the area, and use it

Politicians want to hear from people in their district. The moment the staffer realizes it's a robocall, they will HANG UP and not even record the fact that you called. If you call repeatedly, it still only gets you marked down once, until the staffer realizes that you do nothing but robocall at which time you get marked down zero times.

Anyone using this to advocate an issue is doing active harm to their cause. Call your politician your damn self. It's free.

The point is showing politicians how crass and condescending it is to call someone on the phone with a pre-recorded message.

If they realize you're a robot, start ignoring you, and no one draws any parallels to their own campaign tactics then it probably can't be saved - both the politicians' intelligence and that of voters who respond positively to robocalls - but at least you tried.

My first thought for using the system was harassing corrupt and ignorant jerks, with an ironic twist; I don't think anyone really expects much more from this than a symbolic gesture or some pranks/harassment.

No, give the cost it seems you'd be launching a DDOS on your ability to pay for other things. I'm not sure why the phreaks never did this back in the day. Like, what the hell were you doing with all of that knowledge and capability, if not annoying the heck out of our representatives? If I ever build a time machine that goes backwards into time, captain crunch will be hearing from me.

Some robocalls have been deliberately deceptive: they are run by the opposing candidate using a voice actor to sound like the opponent and made as obnoxious as possible. They were pretending to support the candidate they were trying to defeat.